THE ORGANIZATIONAL COST OF LOW TASTE

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

As AI makes creation cheap and abundant, the real constraint for organizations shifts from producing work to exercising good judgment about what deserves to exist. Companies become slow and complex not primarily because of scale, but because they lack a shared standard of quality ("taste") that allows teams to reject weak ideas early, leading to endless meetings, more process, politics, feature bloat, and the eventual departure of people with the highest standards. In the AI era, where generating ideas and products is nearly effortless, organizations with strong judgment will have a growing competitive advantage because they can filter, simplify, and make decisions quickly, while those without it will become overwhelmed by an ever-expanding number of plausible options.